Death on the Rhine

Prelude to a Murder

‘The very best way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.’

Winston Churchill, 1945

As they sang the final hymn that Sunday in the open air, the top brass could hear the heavy guns still thundering. To the east, the horizon was ablaze with fire. Overhead a Dakota limped back to base, trailing thick black smoke from its port engine. This was Palm Sunday, but the war still continued in all its bitter fury.

Behind the Great Man, dressed for this warlike jaunt in the uniform of his old regiment, the Fourth Hussars, a staff officer whispered to a colleague, ‘Old Jerry’s just put in another counter-attack. But we’re beating the beggars all right!’ The Great Man smiled and, sucking hard on his loose false teeth, launched into the last verse of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ with renewed vigour.

The padre blessed the assembly and then hurried away to help tend the fresh batch of wounded being ferried across the broad, flowing Rhine near the wrecked bridge.

The service finished, the Great Man lit a huge cigar and turned to the Supreme Allied Commander, standing next to him in the open German field. ‘Well, my dear General,’ he chortled expansively, bland, broad face wreathed in blue smoke, ‘we’ve got him. The German is whipped.’

As if to emphasise the Great Man’s words, a Spitfire came in, barrelling low, rolling over and over in a victory roll, before surging high into the grey March sky once again. Obviously, he had just shot down a German plane and wanted everyone to know it.

General Eisenhower, his face worn and pale hands shaking a little as they held one of the sixty cigarettes he smoked a day, nodded. It had been a long campaign. It was now nine months since his troops had landed in Normandy. There had been a lot of tough decisions, failures and heartaches since then. Now, at last, they had crossed Germany’s last great natural barrier. Thank God, the Great Man was right. Germany was virtually whipped. The war in Europe was almost over.

For a little while the two of them and the rest of the top brass peered at the far bank of the Rhine through their binoculars. More and more troops were being ferried across into the smoke and fire of the battle being waged there. Dakotas were coming in low to drop supplies by chute to the hard-pressed paratroopers who were fighting for their lives at the van of the huge attack.

Time and time again the Great Man’s face lit up when he saw something which pleased him. Once or twice he stamped his right foot like a spoiled child watching some exciting new game. Finally he lowered his glasses and lit another cigar. ‘General,’ he said almost playfully to Eisenhower, gesturing to one of the landing barges that had just come from the other side of the great river, ‘I’d like to get into that boat and cross.’

Eisenhower’s customary broad grin vanished. ‘No, Mr Prime Minister,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m the Supreme Commander and I refuse to let you go across. You might get killed.’

The Great Man pouted like a spoiled child, but obeyed.

Half an hour later, when Eisenhower had gone to visit his troops, the Great Man sprang into action. He turned to the sharp-faced, birdlike Field Marshal in charge of the great crossing and said, ‘Monty, why don’t we go across and have a look at the other side?’

Surprisingly enough, Montgomery, who previously had always objected to having the Great Man on the scene when he was fighting a battle – he ‘cluttered up the place too much’ – said, ‘Why not?’

Churchill broke out into a big smile. He shouted to the top brass, ‘Now that General Eisenhower is gone, I’m going across.’ He winked at them boyishly.

Minutes later they were standing on the eastern bank in brilliant sunshine. With a crump the first German shell landed yards away. Earth and gravel showered upwards. One or two of the top brass flinched or ducked instinctively. Not Churchill. Cigar jutting out of the side of his mouth, he strode forwards at a cracking pace. Hurriedly, the reluctant top brass followed.

In the end, as tracer from a machine gun began to zip lethally through the air from a ruined barn to the right, it was too much for General Simpson, commander of the US 9th Army. He said to Montgomery, ‘This is no place for the PM.’

Montgomery shrugged, as if it was no concern of his.

Simpson said, ‘I’d hate to have anything happen to him in my army area.’ He looked at Churchill. The Great Man was striding forwards, puffing out smoke furiously, as if he would never stop.

The machine gun had been joined now by a German multiple mortar. With an ear-splitting howl, six great shells were streaking up into the sky, trailing thick black smoke behind them.

Simpson acted. He caught up with the Great Man and said pointedly, ‘If we keep on going, we’ll soon be in the front line.’

Reluctantly, Churchill allowed himself to be returned to the river, but he wasn’t finished yet. He still wanted to have fun.

He made the top brass take him to where a great iron railway bridge, which had been partially destroyed by the retreating Germans, had fallen into the river. Again in the lead, Churchill simply clambered on to it, as if he was a man in his twenties and not in his sixties. Reluctantly, the others followed.

Now the German gunners on the other bank started to home in on the bridge. Shells howled out of the sky. Great geysers of whirling wild, white water erupted. And they were coming closer. It was almost as if the Germans knew that Adolf Hitler’s most implacable enemy was on that bridge. With a great hollow boom, a shell hit the other side of the bridge. The whole structure vibrated. Shrapnel flew everywhere. A junior officer rushed to General Simpson. ‘Sir… sir!’ he cried excitedly, above the racket, ‘we’re bracketed already. One or more tries and they’ll hit us!’

Simpson had had enough. He caught up with the joyful Churchill, who was revelling in the excitement and danger, as he had always done since he had been a subaltern fighting the ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’, as he called them, in the previous century. ‘There are snipers in front of you. Prime Minister!’ he yelled. ‘They are shelling both sides of the bridge and now they have started to shell the road behind you. I cannot accept the responsibility for your being here and must ask you to come away now.’

A look came on the Great Man’s face which reminded Montgomery of a little boy being called away from his sandcastles on the beach.

Churchill didn’t react. Instead he grasped one of the bridge’s girders with both hands, peering over his shoulder at Simpson as if challenging the American general to pry him loose.

Montgomery decided it was time to act. He snapped in that brisk, high-pitched voice of his, making his ‘r’s’ sound like ‘w’s’, ‘My God, Prime Minister, the war’s nearly over! You don’t want the Huns to kill you at this stage of the game, do you?’

Churchill’s look of petulance vanished. He stared back at the little Field Marshal calmly. ‘My dear Monty,’ he said slowly, ‘twenty-two years ago on this same river a certain – then unknown – Austrian upstart tried to have me killed.’

Montgomery gasped audibly. He knew that Churchill had led an adventurous early life. But he knew nothing of an attempt to assassinate him on the River Rhine nearly a quarter of a century before. ‘What!’ he said somewhat stupidly.

The Great Man smiled. He released his grip on the girder and allowed himself to be led back to the barge. ‘Yes,’ he said, pleased to have startled and bewildered the generals, ‘he failed then and I doubt if Herr Hitler is going to kill me now. Gentlemen, I think I could do with a large – a very large – whisky and soda…’

Book One

Orders to Sail

‘He who eats with the Devil needs a long spoon.’

Old German proverb

One

Almost noiselessly, the killers paddled the little rubber boat through the still water. On the Rhine nothing moved. The barges lay at anchor and the water-police patrol boat had long passed.

To their front, Cologne’s great cathedral rose out of the night, a ragged shadow towering over the city, now silent and shrouded in sleep. For it was two in the morning and even the city’s red light district next to the main station had closed down.

There were four of them, dressed in black, with peaked caps pulled down low over their brutal, war-hardened faces. They knew what they were about to do would cause a great outcry – that’s why they were intent on doing it. Thereafter, they would all be hunted men, but they had been hunted before. The chase was nothing new to them. Besides, they were prepared to give their lives for the holy cause of a reunited Fatherland.

‘Dadrüben!’ their leader hissed urgently. He tugged impatiently at the black patch that hid the socket of his left eye – blown out at Verdun in 1916.

The other three started to steer the little boat in the direction he indicated. Now they could see the vague outline of the steam pinnace, tied to the quayside just below the cathedral. No lights showed, not even mooring lights. But they had expected that. As their leader had growled the previous night when orders had come from Munich to carry out the assassination, ‘You know the Tommies – spend all their time drinking that weak tea of theirs? Was like that in the trenches. Too busy making tea to fight a real war. They’ll be asleep all right, mark my words.’

They had nodded sagely. They were all veterans of the hard fighting of four years in the trenches on the Western Front; they knew their Tommies all right.

Now they were almost up to the boat. It was sleek and white and on its stern hung the hated flag of the English navy, that navy which had virtually starved Imperial Germany into surrender five years before in 1918. On board slept the man who had instituted that blockade, Winston Churchill. That was why the Leader in Munich had picked him as the victim. It would be yet another signal to the German people that all was not lost; that there was still hope in their occupied, beaten country; that the New Germany was on the march at last.

‘Ship your paddles,’ the man with the patch hissed. Noiselessly, they did as he commanded. Under its own momentum the rubber boat continued towards the silent English craft. The man with the patch shot a sharp glance to left and right. The towpath that ran the length of the bank was empty. The Tommy sentries were either not posted or asleep. He smiled to himself. Someone would get a ‘cigar’ thrust into him on the morrow when the Tommies discovered how slack they had been.

‘Anton,’ he commanded. ‘You – the stern.’

The man nodded. Expertly, he reached up, grasped the brass handrail and tugged himself on board, crouching there tensely.

‘Gregor – the bows.’

A second man went up and onto the craft.

Now the man with the patch could hear someone snoring loudly from within. Again he smiled to himself. The Englishman, and he hoped the snorer was the hated Winston Churchill, wouldn’t be snoring much longer. ‘Theo, you come with me.’ Balancing a little awkwardly in the rubber boat, he reached up and pulled himself on board. Theo followed.

Now all four of them were aboard the enemy craft. There was no sound, save that of the snorer and the soft lap-lap of the water against the boat.

The man with the patch raised his right arm and held it there for a full minute, while he counted off the seconds. It was the signal. And they all saw it. All four of them took out the bombs which had been sent with their orders from Munich, and bending, armed them. The soft tick of the time clock seemed hellish loud to the man with the patch. But nothing stirred on the boat. No one had heard. Below the snorer continued to do so noisily.

Now the four of them set about finding a hiding place for the explosive devices. They were timed to go off simultaneously, in twenty minutes, which would give them time to get across the river again into Unoccupied Germany. There arrangements had been made for them to motor to Munich. From there they would cross the border into Austria and lie low till the hue-and-cry was over. As the Leader had told them before they had set out on their mission, ‘The English will make a great song-and-dance. There will be diplomatic outrage and those traitors in Berlin will assist them in attempting to find the culprits. But you will not be found, my brave comrades.’ And his hard Austrian face had broken momentarily into a tight smile. ‘Never! And while the English and their damned Berlin lackeys seek you out, the German people will know that we have struck another blow for Germany’s freedom. Heil!’

As one, their harsh faces glowing with pride and faith, they had sprung to their feet before him and thrust up their right arms in the new salute of their party, bellowing, ‘Heil Hitler!’

Fifty yards away, shrouded in the shadows of the great Hohenzollern Bridge which spanned the river there. Private Mick Taggart pulled the contraceptive off, tied up his flies and reached in his pocket. Leaning against the wall, Lala pulled on her knickers and adjusted her garters. She yawned. She was tired. She had just come from the ‘Bal Musette’, but it had been a slack night in the brothel and as was her custom when her takings were low, she usually serviced one or two of the Tommies who guarded the Rhine on her way back to her room. It was hard, cold work, doing it in the open, but the bored, lonely Tommy sentries were appreciative and were inclined to pay more than her normal customers these days.

‘Zigaretten or geld?’ Private Taggart asked.

‘Beide – both,’ she answered. She could sell the fine English cigarettes on the black market.

Taggart laughed. He slapped her plump, silk-clad bottom appreciatively and said, ‘Do gut jig-jig. Hier, ten Woodbines and a five-mark note. I really enjoyed th—’ He stopped short. Something was moving on the steam pinnace.

‘Was ist los?’ the whore asked, as he bent low and swung his head slowly from left to right.

He didn’t answer. He was using an old trick he’d learned in the trenches. It was the way to spot a dark object at night. There it was – somebody moving on the deck of the boat.

‘Cor ferk a duck!’ he muttered to himself, ‘and with his nibs on board.’

‘Was ist los?’ the whore repeated her query.

By way of an answer he took her by the elbow and propelled her deeper into the shadow of the great bridge. ‘Get out of the way,’ he whispered urgently. ‘Schnell. There might be trouble.’

Hastily, Taggart grabbed his rifle and bayonet, which he had leaned up against the stone wall while he had been occupied with the whore. Taggart was a brave man. He had won the military medal at Ypres in 1915 and the three gold wound stripes on his sleeve bore testimony that he had shed his blood for his country more than once. But four years in the trenches had taught him to be cautious. ‘Don’t stick yer neck out,’ he had always lectured reinforcements, ‘cos ole Jerry’s more’n likely to chop it frigging well orff!’ Now, he approached the boat, rifle tucked into his hip, walking on the side of his hobnailed boots so that he made as little noise as possible.

Already he had spotted two more mysterious figures on the boat and the way they moved, cautiously and half crouched, told him that they were up to no good. Recently, in Occupied Cologne, there had been a lot of talk of lonely British soldiers being waylaid and beaten up. One rumour had it that a British secretary working for the Control Commission had been raped and badly beaten up, while her officer boyfriend had been murdered and tossed in the Rhine. Taggart was an old sweat with ten years service behind him. He had long since given up paying much attention to rumours. Still, he told himself, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Those mysterious figures were out to get Churchill, he was sure of it now.

He was ten yards away from the boat now. The men on the boat made hardly a sound as they moved about, but he could hear someone snoring within the craft. Carefully, he clicked off his safety catch. He already had a bullet in the breech of the Lee Enfield. ‘Always keep one up the spout,’ was his motto, ‘cos yer never knows when yer gonna need it.’

Now he knelt down to present the smallest possible target. It was against Army regulation to challenge in that position. But Private Mick Taggart had survived so long because he had always interpreted Army regulations in his own manner. ‘Who goes there?’ he barked, his voice seeming to be very loud.

‘Scheisse!’ one of the men on the boat cursed. ‘Die Tommies!’

Crack! Scarlet flame stabbed the gloom. A bullet howled off the stonework next to Taggart, showering his face with splinters. Behind, under the bridge, the whore screamed.

‘Ferk this for a tale!’ Taggart yelled angrily. He pressed the trigger. On the craft one of the dark figures shrieked in sudden pain. He flung up his hands dramatically. Next moment he went over backwards and dropped into the water with a splash.

In an instant, all was chaos. As Taggart fired again, lights went on everywhere in the boat. There were angry shouts. Someone shrilled on a whistle. Down the towpath there came the sound of heavy boots running. A man dived over the side. Taggart caught him in mid-dive. He yelped with pain and fell into the rubber boat,